The possibility of passing cap-and-trade legislation ended for the foreseeable future when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives after the 2010 midterm election.
The term 'cap-and-trade" refers to emissions-reduction scheme wherein  the federal government caps the amount of carbon a company may emit. Each company is allotted a number of permits that allows it to emit a specific amount carbon. The individual company must buy additional permits from the federal government, or unused permits from other companies, to go over this cap. Ideally carbon emissions will decline because the free market rewards those who lower their emissions most effectively.

Republicans said cap-and-trade would hurt the economy and destroy jobs, and the opposed the additional costs it would put on the energy industry. So it"s unlikely any sort of cap-and-trade legislation will make its way to the President Obama"s desk in the current Congress. For these reasons we rated Obama"s promise to pass cap-and-trade as Broken and the GOP"s pledge to oppose cap-and-trade as Promise Kept.

In the previous update, we rated this promise Compromise since there existed some hope that funding measures would be included in a renewable energy bill that did not contain a cap-and-trade provision. Yet no bill of this sort has come to pass.

Since the federal government never implemented a nationwide cap-and-trade initiative, there is naturally no revenue that can be garnered from it. As a result, this promise -- to use the funds collected from the auctioning of cap-and-trade permits for environmental and clean energy initiatives -- cannot be fulfilled. Due to the failure of of Congress to pass cap-and-trade we rule this promise as Broken.